A Good Old-Timey Book Burning Is Just What This Country Needs

[ng_nighthawk]

General Patraeus, the President, and Interpol have all got it wrong. Or, rather, they've got it right, but the problem is that they are focusing on tactical problems when the reality is that the public burning of the Koran is a stragetic problem for the U.S. which makes the tactical issues pale in comparison.

Comments

[drdeleto]

According to Wikipedia, the lovely people at Westboro Baptist Church are angry that when they burned the Koran 2 years ago, no one gave them this much attention. This points out what is the real systemic problem (tiny embittered communities of religious folks is the non-systemic problem you can't do anything about): The ability and proclivity of the media to turn an insignificant annoyance into an international socio-political event.

Anyway, I may be way off base here, but I question the use of those two narratives for analyzing the situation because it doesn't seem to me that very many people at all actually believe them. Narrative 1 is probably used more as propaganda than anything; it's not so much believed as embraced because it resonates with certain groups' grievances and anxieties. Narrative 2 is an ideal and an abstraction, a thing not seen in the real world. It's lineaments operate as convenient and comforting avenues of thought for the high-minded.

I wouldn't even say either one of them is particularly more accurate than the other. If you mash the two together, you get at least a slightly clearer picture of the truth: a "campaign of global hegemony by a pluralistic village." I don't think it can be argued that the West isn't (in relative historical terms, at least) generally pluralilstic. But there are two sides to pluralism. On one side is tolerance, a notion few can take exception to. Tolerance is nice! But on the other side of pluralism is a kind of "culture-agnosticism." The West "celebrates" cultures by essentially pretending that they're all equally insignificant--their particulars and peculiarities are quaint little niceties, the equivalent of the decorative capitals of Corinthian or Doric columns--they hold no weight, so to speak. Mind you, I don't think this is a malicious notion, and even though it could be interpreted as patronizing, I don't know that that's fair either. Frankly, it seems a bit inevitable to me--a natural outgrowth of our Enlightenment heritage.

That Enlightenment heritage is not just about pluralism. Pluralism is just one manifestation of the larger principle: what might be called "openness." Openness means being commercially open as well as culturally open. Protectionism is as offensive to us prejudice. Prosperity is as valuable as pluralism.

So the "openness" ideology, seeing cultural differences as mere window-dressing is untroubled by any idea no matter how foreign (why should these things get in the way of, say, commercial prosperity?)... except any idea that challenges openness itself! There's the inevitable irony: the only thing a pluralistic society can't abide to have questioned or dismissed is pluralism! From its vantage point, conflicts of national pride or ancestral territory are just fighting over window dressing. What could fuel such irrational hostility? Through the lens of openness the answer is: Prejudice! Hatred! Opposition to freedom! (Bush was a great openness ideologue: "They hate our freedoms!") The "open" society hates violence, as a rule, but it tolerates it in one case, and that is to clear a path for the onward march of openness itself.

There's where the hegemony comes in. It is quite explicitly a benevolent impulse. But to those who are skeptical of both cultural and commercial openness, it is clearly coercive--it is cultural change, not at the barrel of a gun, but at the ka-ching of a cash register. To those who reject the view that their traditional culture, their national or ethnic identification, their religious doctrine, and, yes, their ancient prejudices are mere window-dressing obscuring the path to free trade and prosperity, the openness ideology is indeed an invader, and it is an insidious one for its principles are essentially admirable. Try to object to it and the pluralistic society is shocked! It's response is Narrative #2: We just want freedom, justice, and prosperity for everyone!